


Responsibilities

by Saeva



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Spoilers, Character Study, Gen, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 16:02:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4841699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saeva/pseuds/Saeva
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A coda for Tony Stark's arc in Avengers: Age of Ultron, especially as it relates to the Maximoffs. Gen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Responsibilities

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AngeNoir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngeNoir/gifts).



> For AngeNoir. AngeNoir, I hope that this is something that you'll enjoy and that when you asked for no 'Ultron' you meant as a character and not as a request to exclude all 'Age of Ultron' movie canon. Otherwise, I tried to make my Tony angsty and add a little suggestive pre-Stony in there if you squint. 
> 
> Re-read by me but not beta'ed by an outside source. I honestly didn't think I was going to wrap this up in time.

Tony sighed, jiggling his phone nervously in his pocket as he realized he really couldn’t put this off any longer. 

The facility was done, ready for moving in and decorating. The system was set, ready to alert the Avengers if anything in their wheelhouse happened somewhere across the world so they could offer their help. He’d said his hellos to everyone who’d want them, helping Rhodey get his newly improved rig for War Machine set up in his rooms and most of his goodbyes, making sure Vision -- who both was and wasn’t J.A.R.V.I.S., an amazing collection he never could have dreamed up even in his most futurist moments while building J’s coding as a 20-something -- was settling in. Tony would be swinging by Barton’s with a baby present (awkward) and an upgrade on his quiver (much more Tony’s style) for when he was ready to come back from paternity leave on the way back to L.A. workshop but Cap would be last, officially. They’d been the first really, working together to keep the helicarrier from careening from the sky, so it seemed fitting to say goodbye Steve last. 

That just left… The Maximoffs.

There were two of them. Still. Everyone keep crediting Tony with that but Helen Cho had survived, despite her injuries, and her remaining staff -- which had been going through the data found in the creepy Hydra lab Ultron later appropriated -- would have thought to try it. Probably. Tony was pretty sure. Either way, he had been the one to suggest they try putting the elder, mostly dead Maximoff, in one of the prototype cradles and it’d worked. From what Tony knew -- heard, because he hadn’t been to see the kid himself yet -- the boy (and, fuck, he was getting old if he thought of someone who was 23 as a boy) said he never actually died. Maximoff’s body had sped up his own experiences so that everything outside of him slowed down, freezing him in that moment where he didn’t age (Hydra had done experiments in that, keeping him sped up long enough to see if he’d age while his sister stayed the same age, somehow he didn’t) and so he didn’t die. He also didn’t black out. 

Reading that sentence in the post-operative report had caused a nasty flashback to Afghanistan and Yinsen standing over him while they tried, despite all odds, to save his life from first the shrapnel and then the infection the unbelievably cold cave combined with the stress of detoxing. Deserts, contrary to popular belief, were cold and only it being summer kept that cave from dropping below freezing at night. Tony had dismissed the report and started making some notes on a way to test that time-space if Maximoff wanted to try. He’d never gone back to the report -- he’d learned, over the last half decade, that purposefully confronting your triggers didn’t make you better at it, just more fucked up -- and gotten the summary from Steve later, who mused about how he’d been lucky, in a way, to sleep through the ice. 

It’d ended like most things did now, with musing about Bucky Barnes. In this case, how Bucky must have felt waking up to time passing over and over with new technologies to learn and new facts to digest. Tony, who’d also learned in the last decade not to be an asshole, had kept his mouth shut about how the brain wipes worked. Notably, learning increasingly creepy things about human anatomy and the lengths you could push it the longer he stayed with the Avengers was part of why he was taking a step back from the Avengers. Eventually they’d find Barnes -- sightings had become more common according to Natasha and Sam Wilson -- and Steve would learn some of the horrors himself but until then Tony left him with dealing with one psychologically fucked up teammate at a time. Another reason Tony was taking a step back from the Avengers. 

But he wasn’t a coward, wouldn’t let himself be, so he couldn’t just slip off now or even go find Steve and slip off afterward. 

He sighed. “Thinking out here won’t make going in there any easier,” a soft voice said, echoing his mental thoughts even as it snapped him out of them. He struggled not to flinch at the sudden, close presence of a teammate who’d snuck up on him while he thought about Steve, and gave Natasha a shrug.

“Maybe not,” he agreed, because it was true, “but I don’t think anything will make going in there any easier.” He said that because it was true too. 

“He’s still pretty angry,” she said, “but Wanda’s on your side enough to argue that you weren’t personally responsible.” 

Tony clenched his teeth for a moment before answering. “It was my company. It was my design. It was the closest thing I had to a real father-figure signing the purchasing orders. I don’t get to say, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize,’ and wipe away years of deaths, civilian deaths. Those missiles were nev --” He stopped, unclenching his hand from his phone in his pocket as it creaked ominously. “I should have realized what he was doing before he literally knocked me over with it.” 

She sighed. “We -- not all of us, perhaps, but most of us here -- have things we need to atone for, giving us cause to fight. Even the Maximoffs became involved in fighting Ultron because without Wanda’s aid it wouldn’t have advanced so far so quickly.” 

Speak of the mind-manipulator… The door Tony had been not so casually loitering in front of opened and Wanda slipped through, her too bright eyes settling on him. Her lips quirked up. “You are thinking very loudly.”

He winced, very purposefully not edging backward despite his discomfort being this close to her. She didn’t have to be at nearly arm-length to manipulate another, specific person’s mind rather than giving a general command like ‘evacuate’ but it helped from what the reports said and he’d been on that ride once. He’d seen most of his friends die on that ride once. “I’d apologize about that but I honestly have no idea if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“I’m not looking for anything from you. I know you didn’t intend for my parents to be harmed, that you were unaware that Stark Industries were involved in that attack, and I believe that. I checked.” She shrugged one thin shoulder as he shifted uncomfortably while wondering when she checked and why he didn’t remember. Natasha made a disapproving noise but Wanda only raised one brunette brow pointedly. “Wouldn’t you?” 

Even he had to admit he would have, given her abilities. Actually, he had to admit no one should ever give him her abilities. He’d done enough while trying to fix things only for it to backfire with only his own high intelligence and determination to bully an equally intelligent Bruce along for the ride. In the corner of his vision Natasha nodded once, agreeing, and he sighed. “So long as I don’t get any more visions of dead friends and wormholes…” 

“I am sorry about that. I did it back when I thought you the villain. I know you are trying to atone, as Natasha says, for what was done in your name.”

“I might not be the villain but --” He stopped, realizing he was about to echo what Steve told him during their first shouting match, and laughed hollowly. “I’m taking some time off from being Iron Man. I -- I read the report from Steve where he repeated what you told him.” Her eyebrow went up again, like she wasn’t sure what he meant, and so he repeated it. “You said that Ultron couldn’t tell the difference between saving the world and destroying it then asked where he thought Ultron got from that. There’s an obvious answer there: me. 

“So, I’m going to keep funding this because the Avengers are a good idea, a necessary one, but I’m not going to keep being on the team. War Machine’s taking my place for a while. I know you and Speedy Gonzales were debating whether to stay on once your brother’s fully recovered and I don’t think it’s arrogant to assume that my presence was probably part of that debate.” Her lips thinned and he knew he’d gotten it on the nose there. “So, you don’t have to worry. James Rhodes, Rhodey, the guy in the gray armor, is a great guy -- I’ve known him for thirty years so I should know -- and he’s going to be on the team while I stick to designing gear and comms and the like.”

“And relief aid projects?” she asked. 

He’d been the face of the Sokovian humane relief and aid project, that was true. Though he hadn’t wanted to be Stark Industries still needed someone on the ground while Pepper and Hill kept their stock from nose-diving a bit too pointedly after two major Avengers-related disasters in a week. That was another reason to take a step back. Without Iron Man the Avengers could still function, War Machine taking his place, but without Stark Industries funding -- something that got knocked down every time SI’s primary inventor-futurist-engineer got into a drag-down fight on camera -- the Avengers were dead in the water. 

Hell, half of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s remains (including the helicarrier that let them evacuate all those people) would be dead in the water.

Tony could do more with his money, his image, and his mind than he could as a fighter and it was time to accept that. “When I have to. The hope is always that another project like the one in Sokovia won’t be necessary.” 

“You’ve done a great deal more than Western media would ask of you to get your stock back up,” she said, stepping away from the door. “Pietro’s still having trouble with control,” she told Natasha. “I was hoping you could help me with some exercises for him.” 

As quickly as that he was dismissed -- she’d already picked up mannerisms from Natasha -- and he took the out for the prompt it was, heading toward the door she’d come out from. The medical section of Avengers’ HQ was filled with the same looks and smells of any other modern medical facility, gleaming white and burning with the chemical stench of antiseptic, though instead of cubicles it was filled with small, mostly private rooms with one glass wall each for observation. Most of the cube-shaped rooms were visibly empty, leaving one with its curtain pulled over the glass wall, though he noticed the door was cracked. 

He knocked on the door frame anyway, waiting for a reply. A gruff, “Wanda, I said I was fine,” met his knock and he poked his head in anyway. 

“Uh, not your sister, Maximoff. She and Natasha are having a bonding session that will no doubt increase your sister’s ability to be threatening when she chooses by about 100 percent.” Tony let the door slowly swing open awkwardly and stayed in the doorway as piercing blue eyes met his. They were almost the same color as Steve’s but where Steve’s were warm, welcoming, Tony only got a sense of coldness from this blue. “I’m making the rounds and I came to give you -- give you both, your sister gets one too -- something, for if you stay here.” 

“You couldn’t leave the gear in the room for gear?” Pietro Maximoff asked, his jaw tightening. 

Tony wondered if this was how he’d feel when he finally met up with Barnes, the man who killed his parents with one well-placed shot on a winding road. Barnes hadn’t realized what was going on any more than Tony had, had been manipulated by masters in a very different way than Obie’s own master manipulations but with the same result. Barnes had been responsible for the death of two people who only died that day because of Stark weaponry and the blindness of their murderer, and the Maximoffs (and so, so many others) had died the same way. He swallowed. “I’m heading out. Taking time off from being Iron Man so I can focus on relief work, clean energy, keeping Stark Industries in the profit margins necessary to fund the Avengers, all that. If you have any questions about it this will be your best chance of asking in person.” 

_If you have questions at all._

He picked the modified SPhone 4 out of his other pocket, swiping to unlock and make sure it wasn’t his. When it didn’t ask for a passcode he tossed it on the bed near where Maximoff sat cross-legged and staring accusingly. He grabbed the second one and tossed it next to the first after another quick check and explained, “This’ll work as a normal phone except that it’ll sync up to the Avengers’ comms and give you alerts if you’re within a certain range of the sort of disaster that you could assist with. You can set what type of thing you want to be notified for -- I tried to make it like an app, intuitive, but what’s intuitive for me isn’t necessarily intuitive for others -- and the range since I don’t know how far you can comfortably run.” He was pretty sure Maximoff didn’t know the answer to that question either. “It’ll also alert you to actual Assembly calls of course and even ties in with the phone’s alarm clock…”

Tony stood back and waited because he wasn’t really here about the phone. He could explain it over Skype just as easily if either Maximoff had a question and would almost certainly have to do so with Steve at least once. Though Tony was beginning to think that Steve was mostly using those questions as excuses to check in when he hadn’t heard from Tony in a couple of days. 

“Wanda says that you did not know your bombs were being used in Sokovia.” 

“I didn’t,” Tony agreed,” but I should have. The truth is I was too wrapped up in myself -- in partying and how clever each new design I made was, how far ahead I was compared to other weapons’ makers -- that I didn’t worry about the business end of the industry. I knew we were making money, a lot of money, but the military industrial complex is an expensive machine so the money didn’t raise any red flags. I took it as evidence my designs were just… better than my father’s had been, then that the war with Al Qaeda was just that profitable, and that’s why we were making so much more money.” He sighed, leaning against the door frame. “I trusted Obie to take care of it and never suspected he was selling weapons to… everyone, really. Pretty much any buyer.”

“She also says that you have done your best, as Iron Man, to recover those bombs. Though Klaue still had a collection it seems.” Maximoff’s teeth dug into his bottom lip, his jaw still tight as he scratched his beard. 

“I recovered those,” Tony said quickly, waving his hand in the air, though maybe not in the direction of southeast Africa. “Klaue’s stash. After the whole --” He waved his hand again, trying to encompass the whole situation in a gesture, “-- thing with… I sent what was left of the Iron Legion, the ones in my new Malibu house and workshop, to recover those and did. His system had some contact information for other arms’ dealers that he recorded as doing business with Stark ballistics -- my stuff was ahead of the curve enough that what’s coming out on the market this year is still behind my pre-clean energy designs -- and I’m going after them too. I don’t -- What happened to your family should never have happened. I know that if it hadn’t been Stark ballistics it would have been someone’s but… 

“If I could put all the arms’ dealers out of business tomorrow I would. I honestly believe that weapons’ proliferation is not the answer, which is why the Iron Legion were purely defensive.” And thank god for that because if the robot army had been able to use smart targeting to come after them as well as using their metallic tooth and claw, so to speak, the Avengers would have lost. “I --” 

“I don’t want your apology. I wanted you to suffer.” Maximoff’s eyes dropped down to the area of Tony’s chest where the arc reactor used to be and Tony shivered as the younger man said, “And you did. You suffered for your blindness. You suffer still. Will you ever sleep well again, knowing how many died?” He flinched and Maximoff smiled. “Wanda is right. Is better than killing you.” He dropped off the bed and onto his feet with the grace of an athlete and the heavy thuds of someone bigger than Tony, picking up the phones. “I will take to Wanda.” Maximoff eyed the door like he didn’t much care if he went through Tony to leave, encouraging the older man to back up. “We are staying.” 

_Oh, yeah, it’s better if I take a breather from the team._

Tony watched the other man leave without another word, breathing more easily once Maximoff flitted out of sight -- at slower speeds that usual but still faster than any unenhanced human could reach. The kid was right though. Tony didn’t sleep well and he wouldn’t until every Stark weapon Obie sold under the table was accounted for. That had been Iron Man’s real mission, the reason Tony created a Mark II, and it was time he focused on it for a while. It might not be saving the world but it would make the world safer. 

“Ah, Man of Iron, Tony, Lady Natasha said that I might find you here,” Thor said from the main doorway to Medical. “I wished to discuss The Vision with you and what the presence of the mind stone forebodes. Captain Rogers awaits us.” 

“I needed to talk to him anyway,” Tony said, letting out a slow breath and smoothing out his expression before he turned around. “So, Vision…” 

Not all of his legacy would be about weaponry and death. Vision was something completely new and with so much potential that Tony couldn’t help but have some hope renewed for the future. Maybe, if they were lucky, machines could save humanity after all, if in a form that none of them expected... not even him.


End file.
